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Asia
(i/ˈeɪʒə/
or /ˈeɪʃə/) is the
Earth's
largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the
eastern
and northern hemispheres. Though it covers only 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area, it comprises 30% of earth's land area, and has historically been home to the bulk of the planet's
human population
(currently roughly 60%). Asia is notable for not only overall large size and population, but unusually dense and large settlements as well as vast barely populated regions within the continent of 4.4 billion people. Asia has exhibited economic dynamism (particularly East Asia) as well as robust population growth during the 20th century, but overall population growth has since fallen to world average levels.[3]

Greek three-continent system

The border between Asia and Europe has historically been determined by Europeans[which?]
only.[dubious–
discuss]
The original distinction between the two was made by the ancient Greeks. They used the
Aegean Sea, the
Dardanelles, the
Sea of Marmara, the
Bosporus, the
Black Sea, the
Kerch Strait, and the
Sea of Azov
as the border between Asia and Europe. The Nile
was often used as the border between Asia and Africa
(then called Libya), although some Greek geographers suggested the Red Sea
would form a better boundary.[7]Darius' canal between the Nile and the Red Sea introduced considerable variation in opinion. Under the
Roman Empire, the
Don River
emptying into the Black Sea was the western border of Asia. It was the northernmost navigable point of the European shore.[citation needed]
In the 15th century the Red Sea became established as the boundary between Africa and Asia, replacing the Nile.[7]

In Sweden, five years after Peter's death, in 1730
Philip Johan von Strahlenberg
published a new atlas proposing the Urals as the border of Asia. The Russians were enthusiastic about the concept, which allowed them to keep their European identity in geography. Tatishchev announced that he had proposed the idea to von Strahlenberg. The latter had suggested the Emba River
as the lower boundary. Over the next century various proposals were made until the Ural River
prevailed in the mid-19th century. The border had been moved perforce from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea into which the Ural River projects.[8]
In the maps of the period, Transcaucasia
was counted as Asian. The incorporation of most of that region into the Soviet Union
tended to push views of the border to the south. Asian cultures had no say in this system of determining the imaginary boundaries separating them from Europe.[citation needed]

Asia–Oceania boundary

The border between Asia and the loosely defined region of
Oceania
is usually placed somewhere in the Malay Archipelago. The terms Southeast Asia and Oceania, devised in the 19th century, have had several vastly different geographic meanings since their inception. The chief factor in determining which islands of the Malay Archipelago are Asian has been the location of the colonial possessions of the various empires there (not all European). Lewis and Wigen assert, "The narrowing of 'Southeast Asia' to its present boundaries was thus a gradual process."[7]

Ongoing definition

Geographical Asia is a cultural artifact of European conceptions of the world being imposed onto other cultures, an imprecise concept causing endemic contention about what it means. Asia is larger and more culturally diverse than Europe.[9]
It does not exactly correspond to the cultural borders of its various types of constituents.[10]

From the time of
Herodotus
a minority of geographers have rejected the three-continent system (Europe, Africa, Asia) on the grounds that there is no or is no substantial physical separation between them.[6]
For example, Sir Barry Cunliffe, the emeritus professor of European archeology at Oxford, argues that Europe has been geographically and culturally merely "the western excrescence of the continent of Asia".[11]
Geographically, Asia is the major eastern constituent of the continent of Eurasia
with Europe being a northwestern peninsula
of the landmass – or of Afro-Eurasia; geologically, Asia, Europe and Africa make up a single continuous landmass (except for the Suez Canal) and share a common
continental shelf. Almost all of Europe and the better part of Asia sit atop the
Eurasian Plate, adjoined on the south by the
Arabian
and Indian Plate
and with the easternmost part of Siberia (east of the Chersky Range) on the
North American Plate.

Etymology

Ptolemy's Asia

The English word, "Asia," was originally a concept of
Greek civilization.[12]
The place name, "Asia", in various forms in a large number of modern languages is of unknown ultimate provenience. Its etymology and language of origin are uncertain. It appears to be one of the most ancient of recorded names. A number of theories have been published. English Asia can be traced through the formation of English literature to Latin literature, where it has the same form, Asia. Whether all uses and all forms of the name derive also from the Latin of the Roman Empire
is much less certain.

Classical antiquity

Latin Asia and Greek Ἀσία appear to be the same word. Roman authors translated Ἀσία as Asia. The Romans named a province
Asia (Roman province), which roughly corresponds with modern-day central-western Turkey. There was an Asia Minor and an Asia Major located in modern-day
Iraq. As the earliest evidence of the name is Greek, it is likely circumstantially that Asia came from Ἀσία, but ancient transitions, due to the lack of literary contexts, are difficult to catch in the act. The most likely vehicles were the ancient geographers and historians, such as
Herodotus, who were all Greek. Roman civilization Hellenized extensively.
Ancient Greek
certainly evidences early and rich uses of the name.[13]

The first continental use of Asia is attributed to Herodotus (about 440 BC), not because he innovated it, but because his
Histories
are the earliest surviving prose to describe it in any detail. He defines it carefully,[14]
mentioning the previous geographers whom he had read, but whose works are now missing. By it he means Anatolia
and the Persian Empire, in contrast to
Greece
and Egypt. Herodotus comments that he is puzzled as to why three women's names were "given to a tract which is in reality one" (Europa,
Asia, and
Libya, referring to Africa), stating that most Greeks assumed that Asia was named after the wife of
Prometheus
(i.e. Hesione), but that the
Lydians
say it was named after Asies, son of Cotys, who passed the name on to a tribe at Sardis.[15]
In Greek mythology, "Asia" (Ἀσία) or "Asie" (Ἀσίη) was the name of a "Nymph
or Titan
goddess of Lydia."[16]

Herodotus' geographical puzzlement was perhaps only a form of disagreement, as, having read the earlier Greek poetry along with everyone else literate, he would have known perfectly well why places received female names. Athens, Mycenae, Thebes and many other locations in fact had them. In ancient Greek religion, places were under the care of female divinities, parallel to guardian angels. The poets detailed their doings and generations in allegoric language salted with entertaining stories, which subsequently playwrights transformed into classical Greek drama and became "Greek mythology."

For example,
Hesiod
mentions the daughters of Tethys
and Ocean, among whom are a "holy company", "who with the Lord
Apollo
and the Rivers have youths in their keeping."[17]
Many of these are geographic: Doris, Rhodea, Europa, Asia. Hesiod explains:[18]

"For there are three-thousand neat-ankled daughters of Ocean who are dispersed far and wide, and in every place alike serve the earth and the deep waters."

The
Iliad
(attributed by the ancient Greeks to Homer) mentions two Phrygians (the tribe that replaced the
Luvians
in Lydia) in the Trojan War
named Asios
(an adjective meaning "Asian");[19]
and also a marsh or lowland containing a marsh in Lydia as ασιος.[20]

Bronze Age

Before Greek poetry, the
Aegean Sea
area was in a Greek Dark Age, at the beginning of which syllabic writing was lost and alphabetic writing had not begun. Prior to then in the
Bronze Age
the records of the Assyrian Empire, the
Hittite Empire
and the various Mycenaean
states of Greece mention a region undoubtedly Asia, certainly in Anatolia, including if not identical to Lydia. These records are administrative and do not include poetry.

The Mycenaean states were destroyed about 1200 BC by unknown agents although one school of thought assigns the
Dorian invasion
to this time. The burning of the palaces baked clay diurnal administrative records written in a Greek syllabic script called Linear B, deciphered by a number of interested parties, most notably by a young World War II cryptographer,
Michael Ventris, subsequently assisted by the scholar,
John Chadwick. A major cache discovered by
Carl Blegen
at the site of ancient Pylos
included hundreds of male and female names formed by different methods.

Some of these are of women held in servitude (as study of the society implied by the content reveals). They were used in trades, such as cloth-making, and usually came with children. The epithet, lawiaiai, "captives," associated with some of them identifies their origin. Some are ethnic names. One in particular, aswiai, identifies "women of Asia."[21]
Perhaps they were captured in Asia, but some others, Milatiai, appear to have been of Miletus, a Greek colony, which would not have been raided for slaves by Greeks. Chadwick suggests that the names record the locations where these foreign women were purchased.[22]
The name is also in the singular, Aswia, which refers both to the name of a country and to a female of it. There is a masculine form, aswios. This Aswia appears to have been a remnant of a region known to the Hittites as Assuwa, centered on Lydia, or "Roman Asia." This name, Assuwa, has been suggested as the origin for the name of the continent "Asia".[23]
The Assuwa league
was a confederation of states in western Anatolia, defeated by the Hittites
under Tudhaliya I
around 1400 BC.

Alternatively, the
etymology
of the term may be from the Akkadian
word (w)aṣû(m), which means 'to go outside' or 'to ascend', referring to the direction of the sun at sunrise in the Middle East and also likely connected with the Phoenician word
asa
meaning east. This may be contrasted to a similar etymology proposed for Europe, as being from Akkadian
erēbu(m)
'to enter' or 'set' (of the sun).

T.R. Reid
supports this alternative etymology, noting that the ancient Greek name must have derived from asu, meaning 'east' in
Assyrian
(ereb
for Europe
meaning 'west').[12]
The ideas of Occidental
(form LatinOccidens
'setting') and Oriental
(from Latin Oriens
for 'rising') are also European invention, synonymous with Western
and Eastern.[12]
Reid further emphasizes that it explains the Western point of view of placing all the peoples and cultures of Asia into a single classification, almost as if there were a need for setting the distinction between Western and Eastern civilizations
on the Eurasian
continent.[12]
Ogura Kazuo and Tenshin Okakura are two outspoken Japanese figures on the subject.[12]

The coastal periphery was home to some of the world's earliest known civilizations, each of them developing around fertile river valleys. The civilizations in
Mesopotamia, the
Indus Valley
and the Huanghe
shared many similarities. These civilizations may well have exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics
and the wheel. Other innovations, such as writing, seem to have been developed individually in each area. Cities, states and empires developed in these lowlands.

The central steppe region had long been inhabited by horse-mounted nomads who could reach all areas of Asia from the
steppes. The earliest postulated expansion out of the steppe is that of the
Indo-Europeans, who spread their languages into the Middle East, South Asia, and the borders of
China, where the
Tocharians
resided. The northernmost part of Asia, including much of Siberia, was largely inaccessible to the steppe nomads, owing to the dense forests, climate and
tundra. These areas remained very sparsely populated.

The center and the peripheries were mostly kept separated by mountains and deserts. The
Caucasus
and Himalaya
mountains and the Karakum
and Gobi
deserts formed barriers that the steppe horsemen could cross only with difficulty. While the urban city dwellers were more advanced technologically and socially, in many cases they could do little in a military aspect to defend against the mounted hordes of the steppe. However, the lowlands did not have enough open grasslands to support a large horsebound force; for this and other reasons, the nomads
who conquered states in China, India, and the Middle East often found themselves adapting to the local, more affluent societies.

The Islamic
Caliphate
took over the Middle East and Central Asia during the Muslim conquests
of the 7th century. The Mongol Empire
conquered a large part of Asia in the 13th century, an area extending from China to Europe. Before the Mongol invasion, Song China
reportedly had approximately 120 million citizens; the 1300 census which followed the invasion reported roughly 60 million people.[25]

The
Black Death, one of the most devastating
pandemics
in human history, is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road.[26]

The
Russian Empire
began to expand into Asia from the 17th century, and would eventually take control of all of Siberia and most of Central Asia
by the end of the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire
controlled Anatolia, the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans from the 16th century onwards. In the 17th century, the Manchu
conquered China and established the Qing Dynasty. In the 16th century, the Islamic
Mughal Empire
controlled much of India.

Asia has extremely diverse climates and geographic features. Climates range from arctic and subarctic in Siberia to tropical in southern India and Southeast Asia. It is moist across southeast sections, and dry across much of the interior. Some of the largest daily temperature ranges on Earth occur in western sections of Asia. The monsoon circulation dominates across southern and eastern sections, due to the presence of the Himalayas forcing the formation of a thermal low which draws in moisture during the summer. Southwestern sections of the continent are hot. Siberia is one of the coldest places in the Northern Hemisphere, and can act as a source of arctic air masses for North America. The most active place on Earth for tropical cyclone activity lies northeast of the Philippines and south of Japan. The
Gobi Desert
is in Mongolia
and the Arabian Desert
stretches across much of the Middle East. The Yangtze River
in China is the longest river in the continent. The Himalayas
between Nepal and China is the tallest mountain range in the world. Tropical rainforests stretch across much of southern Asia and coniferous and deciduous forests lie farther north.

Climate change

A survey carried out in 2010 by global risk analysis farm
Maplecroft
identified 16 countries that are extremely vulnerable to climate change. Each nation's vulnerability was calculated using 42 socio, economic and environmental indicators, which identified the likely climate change impacts during the next 30 years. The Asian countries of Bangladesh,
India,
Vietnam,
Thailand,
Pakistan
and Sri Lanka
were among the 16 countries facing extreme risk from climate change. Some shifts are already occurring. For example, in tropical parts of India with a semi-arid climate, the temperature increased by 0.4 °C between 1901 and 2003. A 2013 study by the
International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics
(ICRISAT) aimed to find science-based, pro-poor approaches and techniques that would enable Asia's agricultural systems to cope with climate change, while benefitting poor and vulnerable farmers. The study's recommendations ranged from improving the use of climate information in local planning and strengthening weather-based agro-advisory services, to stimulating diversification of rural household incomes and providing incentives to farmers to adopt natural resource conservation measures to enhance forest cover, replenish groundwater and use
renewable energy.[28]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Japan's GDP was almost as large (current exchange rate method) as that of the rest of Asia combined.[citation needed]
In 1995, Japan's economy nearly equaled that of the USA as the largest economy in the world for a day, after the Japanese currency reached a record high of 79 yen/US$. Economic growth in Asia since World War II to the 1990s had been concentrated in Japan as well as the four regions of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore located in the
Pacific Rim, known as the
Asian tigers, which have now all received developed country status, having the highest
GDP per capita
in Asia.[38]

Mumbai
is one of the most populous cities on the continent. The city is an infrastructure and tourism hub, and plays a crucial role in the Economy of India.

Asia is the largest continent in the world by a considerable margin, and it is rich in natural resources, such as petroleum, forests, fish, water, rice, copper and silver. Manufacturing in Asia has traditionally been strongest in East and Southeast Asia, particularly in
China,
Taiwan,
South Korea,
Japan, India, the
Philippines, and
Singapore. Japan and South Korea continue to dominate in the area of
multinational corporations, but increasingly the PRC and India are making significant inroads. Many companies from Europe, North America, South Korea and Japan have operations in Asia's developing countries to take advantage of its abundant supply of cheap labour and relatively developed infrastructure.

According to
Citigroup
9 of 11 Global Growth Generators
countries came from Asia driven by population and income growth. They are Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia,
Iraq, Mongolia, Philippines,
Sri Lanka
and Vietnam.[40]
Asia has four main financial centers: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai. Call centers
and business process outsourcing
(BPOs) are becoming major employers in India and the Philippines due to the availability of a large pool of highly skilled, English-speaking
workers. The increased use of outsourcing has assisted the rise of India and the China as financial centers. Due to its large and extremely competitive information technology industry, India has become a major hub for outsourcing.

In 2010, Asia had 3.3 million millionaires (people with net worth over US$1 million excluding their homes), slightly below North America with 3.4 million millionaires. Last year Asia had toppled Europe.[41]
Citigroup in The Wealth Report 2012 stated that Asian centa-millionaire overtook North America's wealth for the first time as the world's "economic center of gravity" continued moving east. At the end of 2011, there were 18,000 Asian people mainly in Southeast Asia, China and Japan who have at least $100 million in disposable assets, while North America with 17,000 people and Western Europe with 14,000 people.[42]

Tourism

With growing Regional Tourism with domination of Chinese visitors,
MasterCard
has released Global Destination Cities Index 2013 with 10 of 20 are dominated by Asia and Pacific Region Cities and also for the first time a city of a country from Asia (Bangkok) set in the top-ranked with 15.98 international visitors.[43]

East Asia
had by far the strongest overall Human Development Index
(HDI) improvement of any region in the world, nearly doubling average HDI attainment over the past 40 years, according to the report’s analysis of health, education and income data. China, the second highest achiever in the world in terms of HDI improvement since 1970, is the only country on the "Top 10 Movers" list due to income rather than health or education achievements. Its per capita income increased a stunning 21-fold over the last four decades, also lifting hundreds of millions out of income poverty. Yet it was not among the region’s top performers in improving school enrolment and life expectancy.[44]Nepal, a South Asian country, emerges as one of the world’s fastest movers since 1970 mainly due to health and education achievements. Its present
life expectancy
is 25 years longer than in the 1970s. More than four of every five children of school age in Nepal now attend primary school, compared to just one in five 40 years ago.[44]
Japan and South Korea ranked highest among the countries grouped on the HDI (number 11 and 12 in the world, which are in the "very high human development" category), followed by Hong Kong (21) and Singapore
(27). Afghanistan
(155) ranked lowest amongst Asian countries out of the 169 countries assessed.[44]

Languages

Asia is home to several
language families
and many language isolates. Most Asian countries have more than one language that is natively spoken. For instance, according to
Ethnologue, more than 600 languages are spoken in Indonesia, more than 800 languages spoken in India, and more than 100 are spoken in the Philippines. China has many languages and dialects in different provinces.

Islam, which originated in
Saudi Arabia, is the largest and most widely spread religion in Asia. With 12.7% of the world Muslim population, the country currently with the largest Muslim population in the world is
Indonesia, followed by
Pakistan,
India,
Bangladesh,
Iran
and Turkey.
Mecca,
Medina
and to a lesser extent Jerusalem
are the holiest cities for Islam in all the world. These religious sites attract large numbers of devotees from all over the world, particularly during the Hajj
and Umrah
seasons. Iran
is the largest Shi'a
country and Pakistan
has the largest Ahmadiyya
population.

The
Bahá'í Faith
originated in Asia, in Iran (Persia), and spread from there to the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia, India, and Burma during the lifetime of Bahá'u'lláh. Since the middle of the 20th century, growth has particularly occurred in other Asian countries, because Bahá'í activities in many Muslim countries has been severely suppressed
by authorities. Lotus Temple
is a big Baha'i Temple in India.

As of 2012, Hinduism has around 1.1 billion adherents. The faith represents around 25% of Asia's population and is the second largest religion in Asia. However, it is mostly concentrated in South Asia. Over 80% of the populations of both India and Nepal adhere to Hinduism, alongside significant communities in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and
Bali, Indonesia. Many overseas Indians in countries such as Burma, Singapore and Malaysia also adhere to Hinduism.

Jainism
is found mainly in India and in oversea Indian communities such as the United States and Malaysia. Sikhism
is found in Northern India and amongst overseas Indian communities in other parts of Asia, especially Southeast Asia. Confucianism
is found predominantly in Mainland China, South Korea, Taiwan and in overseas Chinese populations. Taoism
is found mainly in Mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. Taoism is easily syncretized with Mahayana Buddhism
for many Chinese, thus exact religious statistics is difficult to obtain and may be understated or overstated.

Other Asian writers who won Nobel Prize for literature include
Yasunari Kawabata
(Japan, 1968), Kenzaburō Ōe
(Japan, 1994), Gao Xingjian
(China, 2000), Orhan Pamuk
(Turkey, 2006), and Mo Yan
(China, 2012). Some may consider the American writer, Pearl S. Buck, an honorary Asian Nobel laureate, having spent considerable time in China as the daughter of missionaries, and based many of her novels, namely
The Good Earth
(1931) and The Mother
(1933), as well as the biographies of her parents of their time in China, The Exile
and Fighting Angel, all of which earned her the Literature prize in 1938.

Also,
Mother Teresa
of India and Shirin Ebadi
of Iran were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their significant and pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially for the rights of women and children. Ebadi is the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive the prize. Another Nobel Peace Prize winner is Aung San Suu Kyi
from Burma
for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a military dictatorship in Burma. She is a nonviolent pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma(Myanmar) and a noted prisoner of conscience. She is a Buddhist
and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Most recently, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." He is the first Chinese citizen to be awarded a Nobel Prize of any kind while residing in China.

Amartya Sen, (born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and
social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members.

In 2006, Dr.
Muhammad Yunus
of Bangladesh was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the establishment of Grameen Bank, a community development bank that lends money to poor people, especially women in Bangladesh. Dr. Yunus received his PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University, United States. He is internationally known for the concept of micro credit which allows poor and destitute people with little or no collateral to borrow money. The borrowers typically pay back money within the specified period and the incidence of default is very low.

The Dalai Lama has received approximately eighty-four awards over his spiritual and political career.[69]
On 22 June 2006, he became one of only four people ever to be recognized with Honorary Citizenship by the Governor General of Canada. On 28 May 2005, he received the Christmas Humphreys Award from the Buddhist Society in the United Kingdom. Most notable was the Nobel Peace Prize, presented in Oslo, Norway
on 10 December 1989.